Circles of Power: The Most Influential People in Canada

Edelgard E. Mahant is a political sciences professor at Laurentian
University.

This book is an example of good journalistic research and writing.
Fleming sets himself at least four goals: to assess whether Canadians’
disillusionment with our ruling classes is justified, to gauge how the
composition of the Canadian elite has changed over the past 25 years,
“to measure the openness to newcomers of the major elites,” and to
give an “entertaining, insightful look at the people who have power
and how they use it.” Obviously the book cannot do all of this. It in
fact concentrates on the last goal, and makes a pretty good attempt to
cover the third one.

Fleming deals with elites in five areas: politics, business, the social
establishment, religion, and the media. A short tabular appendix gives
basic statistical information, such as education and ethnic origin, for
each elite. The most surprising finding is the dominance of
private-school education. More than one-third of all elites, including
politicians and the media, had attended private schools. The only
exceptions, curiously, were the bishops of the Anglican Church: only 5
percent of them had attended private school.

Sections on each of the elites are further subdivided into chapters on
subjects such as the bureaucratic and the political elite. In the
section on the business elite, there is a chapter on the difficulties
women face in advancing in the Canadian business world. Insightful and
analytic, this chapter is the best in the book. Other chapters describe
the social establishment of Toronto, and the lives of the sons and
grandsons [sic] of wealthy Canadians. Some chapters degenerate into
little more than lists. There are, for example, pages of short
paragraphs that each say just a little about the leading socialites of
the West and the Maritimes. Such lists guarantee that the book will not
be just a good read!

The book has two limitations, only one of which can be blamed on
Fleming. He repeatedly stresses the influence of British Protestantism
on Canada and its political culture. He underestimates the importance of
French-Canadians, Catholics, and other groups. Fleming himself points
out that almost half of all Canadians have been Catholic since 1961, and
that since World War II a majority of Canadians no longer descend from
inhabitants of the British Isles. His own figures show that the business
and media elite are still dominated by those who have at least one
parent of British descent, but in the case of the media that is partly
due to his failure to include many of the French-speaking media elite in
his survey. The political and religious elite include a high proportion
of individuals of non-British origin. Canada’s political culture has
been shaped by Protestant as well as Catholic attitudes, both of which
tend to favor authority and hierarchy.

The other problem is typical of studies of this kind: it is almost
impossible to determine who is truly powerful. Studying the “top” of
various institutions, from cabinet ministers to deputy ministers and
members of corporate boards, assumes that those who are in important
positions are also powerful. That may indeed be the case, but only a
series of detailed case studies of who causes what to happen in Canada
could satisfactorily settle the question of who is powerful. This is not
Fleming’s task, but it is a question that keeps recurring as one reads
the book.

In his conclusions, Fleming makes a brief, superficial attempt to
recommend measures that would make the elite more open to
underrepresented groups, such as women and nonwhites. He concludes by
preaching that Canadians would get along better if they had more
profound religious convictions—a doubtful proposition, since religion
can be a greater divider of peoples. Finally, the index is hurriedly and
poorly done and misses many entries.